Phonics and Early Reading Flashcards
6 cards from real QTS practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 6 Phonics and Early Reading flashcards as text
What are 'tricky words' (also called common exception words) in phonics programmes?
Answer: Words that cannot be fully decoded using taught phonics at that stage
Tricky words are words where the grapheme-phoneme correspondences do not follow patterns pupils have been taught yet, such as 'said' or 'the', requiring partial or whole-word memorisation.
Which phoneme is represented by the grapheme 'igh'?
Answer: /aɪ/ as in 'light'
The grapheme 'igh' represents the phoneme /aɪ/, as in words like 'light', 'night', and 'right'. It is a trigraph (three letters, one sound).
In SSP, what is meant by 'segmenting'?
Answer: Breaking a word into its individual phonemes to spell it
Segmenting is the process of separating a spoken word into its constituent phonemes in order to spell it — the reverse process of blending.
Which phase of Letters and Sounds introduces consonant clusters such as 'bl', 'cr', and 'str'?
Answer: Phase 4
Phase 4 of Letters and Sounds focuses on adjacent consonants (clusters) such as blends, consolidating Phase 2 and 3 graphemes in words with more complex structures.
What is 'phonemic awareness'?
Answer: The ability to hear, identify and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words
Phonemic awareness is an oral and auditory skill — it refers to awareness of and ability to manipulate the individual phonemes in spoken language, before print is introduced.
The Phonics Screening Check includes 'pseudo-words'. What is their purpose?
Answer: To assess decoding skills without relying on sight word recognition
Pseudo-words (nonsense words) are included to ensure pupils are using phonics decoding rather than recognising whole words from memory.